Our ongoing love affair with the threat of nuclear war...

[La Coliniere]

3. Our ongoing affair with the utterly unspeakable horror

of nuclear annihilation that we have lived under since the 1950s was enough to make me think long and hard about bringing up children in such a horrific reality. I’m a baby boomer who grew up during the Cold War and was repeatedly terrorized with the many in school duck and cover drills we seemed to have weekly back in the late 50s. I recall quite vividly the terrifying nightmares I had as a child in regards to a nuclear attack. The great film director Stanley Kubrick believed than our embrace of the nuclear/hydrogen bomb and our willingness to live under the constant threat of total destruction was proof enough that human beings were an inherently insane species, particularly Americans (hence his move London in 1962). Now we subject our children to active shooter drills; I can’t dispute Kubrick’s opinion.